January 8 - Behind the Curtain

Supposedly the guy was high up in the Church of Satan.
He definitely looked the part. He was always dressed in black, even in the summer--black pants, black leather blazer, some sort of black or red shirt, black boots. His head was shaved and he had a long goatee and these little, beady eyes. If you got close enough to steal a closer look, the rings on his hands were adorned with skulls and pentagrams. Sometimes you would see him walking some sort of hulking albino wolfhound. Often he was with a woman, the kind of woman you would expect to see with Marilyn Manson.
You could tell people recognized him, the way people recognize local quasi-celebrities. But they didn't want to let on that they knew him, so they went out of their way not to gawk. And that seemed to suit him fine, walking down the street with the baddest dog, the freakiest chick, and the evilest wardrobe. I didn't know how much of the stuff about Satanism was true, but it was easy to let your imagination err on the side of the fantastic. I pictured candles, darkness, sacrifices, alters, orgies with blood. Leather, robes, Slayer, piercings, Wagner, fingernails painted black, and rituals in Latin.
One Sunday night I saw him at the supermarket. He was dressed in black, of course, but he was by himself doing his grocery shopping. I pretended to check out something in his aisle, excited to see what kind of evil shit was in his cart.
It was very disappointing.
Dude had Snackwell cookies in there. Silk Soymilk. A head of iceberg lettuce, Grape Nuts, baloney, toilet paper, fair trade coffee, some produce--and not particularly interesting produce: tomatoes, bananas, that kind of thing.
I couldn't believe it.
First of all, how did a guy that was supposed to be high up in the Church of Satan buy his own groceries? Shouldn't he have minions to do that kind of thing for him?
And the crap he was buying: Snackwell cookies? Soymilk? What the hell? Dude presented himself to the world like he was the embodiment of evil and sinful debauchery and most of what he was buying was health food. His cart should have been full of red meat, sides of lamb dripping with blood that he would eat raw. Bottle after bottle of red wine, impossibly decadent desserts, rich cheeses from Europe, exotic fruits from places I'd never heard of that he and his cabal of dangerous hotties would use in disturbingly obscene fertility rites.
But no.
He was buying really boring shit, just like the rest of us. I'll bet he used coupons, too.
I went home that night feeling like the world had become a slightly less interesting place. For all I knew, he also wore sweat pants around the house, forwarded emails, watched The Simpsons, got annoyed by traffic, and kept a garden. I had to wonder if the guy had ever even been in a three-way.
The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that his followers were anything to be impressed by.